Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in rural New England. Walking her dog one day in the woods, she finds a cryptic note under a rock: ‘Her name was Magda,’ it reads.
Mia Levitin
Portrait of a paranoiac: Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
A cryptic message discovered in the New England woods leads to madness and breakdown for Moshfegh’s lonely, widowed protagonist
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